Genesis Vol 3.pdf - College Press

12:l-20 GENESIS
made by the joint expedition of the British Museum and
the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, under
Charles Leonard Woolley (1922-1934), set forth volum-
inously in official reports, seem to verify the Southern
Mesopotamian identification. However, the debate has
been revived in recent years by C. H. Gordon and other
archaeologists who conclude that the original Ur was not
Urffa, but Ura, another town near Haran, which was
under the control of the Hittites. DBA, 602: “Gordon
treats Abraham as a merchant-prince or Tamkarum from
the realm of the Hittites. His three main arguments are:
(1) There is strong tradition connecting Ur of the Chal-
dees with Northern Mesopotamia. (2) The picture of the
patriarchs as city-merchants fits known facts. (3) The
term ‘Chaldees’ can be adequately applied to Northern
Mesopotamia.” The consensus of archeological scholarship,
however, still runs preponderantly in favor of the tradi-
tional Sumerian Ur as Abram’s point of departure on his
pilgrimage to the Land of Promise.
Excavations at Sumerian Ur indicate that a highly
advanced culture flourished there at a very early age. It
is the Ur of Abram’s time, however, in which we are
particularly interested here. Like all these cities of Meso-
potamia, Ur had its sacred enclosure with its complex of
temples and shrines. The ruins of the great temple-tower
(ziggurat, which, we are told, once rose from qhe plain
along the Euphrates to a height of seventy feet), built by
Ur-Nammu, *founder of the prosperous and powerful Third
Dynasty, still dominate the site. Throughout the history
of Babylonia down to the middle of the first millenium
B.C., this sacred area with its ziggurat was the most im-
portant temple area in Mesopotamia: indeed, it was the
place to which the devout made pilgrimages and which
they sought ‘for a place of burial. Openings in the outer
city walls which were oval in shape allowed boats to enter
the city itself. It could be said of the people of Ur, as
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